The Virtual Storage Guy

NetApp Releases VSC 2.1 vCenter Plug-in for VMware vSphere

NetApp has released the Virtual Storage Console 2.1 (VSC); our VMware vCenter plug-in. Behind the scenes the VSC is actually a framework from a number of sub-plug-ins (VSC, Rapid Cloning Utility and SMVI) delivered in a single installation. We created this sub-plug-in architecture as a way to enable new plug-ins without having to create multiple NetApp tabs in vCenter.

The main feature in the VSC 2.1 is a rewritten infrastructure discovery process. As I don't write code I am challenged to share with you the details of the changes made; however, I can share with you that a 30 node vSphere cluster, booting from SAN, with 1,505 virtual machines stored on 69 datastores used to take 35.45 minutes to discover. With version 2.1 the baseline discovery process now completes in 1.94 minutes and subsequent updates complete in 16 seconds!

The VSC also includes a new version of MBRAlign that supports I/O offload for correcting misaligned partitions in VMs running on NFS datastores. This capability reduces load on the hypervisor and storage network in order to reduce the time required to align the partition in the VMDK.

The VSC is the recommended best practice for deploying VMware on NetApp. It's also a free product available on the NOW site. Note, the backup and store capability requires a SMVI license.

Here's an overview of the capabilities of the VSC and enablments available in vCenter:

Supported Configurations

Site Recovery Manager: It’s Not Just for VMs

A key goal at NetApp is advancing the value of storage in the virtual data center from the traditional model of highly available storage to a more advanced virtual object oriented model. This approach is unified in nature as it provides the traditional functions of high availability, high performance, and the traditional storage provisioning of LUNs and file shares while also expanding into the realm of management of virtualized objects by the virtualization administrative team.

By virtualized objects I am specifically speaking of the objects that a VMware admin care about such as VMs, Datastores, workflow automation tools such SRM or View Manager, etc. For this blog I’d like to share with you an example of the direction NetApp is taking storage virtualization by discussing how to integrate a NetApp NAS file server into a VMware SRM recovery plan.